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The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painters

26 March 2008

Tate Britain Linbury Galleries4 June – 31 August 2008

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, opening at Tate Britain on 4 June, is the first exhibition to survey the history of British painters’ representations of the Middle East from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It will explore the great range of artistic responses to the peoples, cities and landscapes of the regions lying just across the Mediterranean from Europe.

The exhibition will reveal the wealth of Orientalist painting which followed the arrival of steam travel in the nineteenth century. Art and tourism flourished in places that were now relatively easy to reach by boat, and artists were drawn to visit and paint the areas they explored including Cairo, Jerusalem and Istanbul (Constantinople), often travelling via Spain and Morocco, or through Greece and the Balkans. The exhibition will examine how British painters sought to convince their audiences of the authenticity of their images, often by using intensely detailed compositions. It will also show how deriving drama and romance from the Orient was central to their work. In images of the harem and of the Holy Land, in particular, these two impulses were often in fascinating tension, leaving the viewer to question the accuracy of the subjects they were depicting.

Bringing together over 110 pictures and watercolours from collections around the world, The Lure of the East will include major works by celebrated British painters such as Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt, Richard Dadd, Lord Leighton and John Frederick Lewis. It will also bring together many important and rarely seen works from private collections. The exhibition will look at the long tradition of British sitters being portrayed in different varieties of Oriental dress, and its themes will include landscapes, cityscapes, genre scenes, the harem and the Holy City.

The exhibition will also inevitably engage with ongoing debates around the concept of ‘Orientalism’ - the representation of the East in Western arts and literature – and its political contexts.

Organised by Tate Britain in association with the Yale Center for British Art, The Lure of the East is curated by Nicholas Tromans (Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University, London). The exhibition opens first at the Yale Center (February 7 – April 28 2008) before coming to Tate Britain. Afterwards, in collaboration with the British Council, it will travel to the Pera Museum, Istanbul (October 2008 – January 2009) and the Sharjah Art Museum (February – April 2009).

A fully illustrated catalogue edited by Nicholas Tromans and published by Tate Publishing, will accompany the exhibition (priced £24.99). This includes essays by Rana Kabbani, Fatema Mernissi, Christine Riding, Nicholas Tromans and Emily M. Weeks.